“Not enough memory to run Microsoft Office Excel” error

Question

One of our users had to do a Windows repair to fix a General Protection Fault error. That worked, but a bunch of programs, including Office, had to be reinstalled. The reinstalls have mostly been successful--Outlook and Word work fine--but when he tries to start Excel, he gets the error "Not enough memory to run Microsoft Office Excel".

I've tried reinstalling, running detect and repair, using the Windows Installer Clean Up utility, creating a new profile and trying to run the program as that user. Nothing seems to work. Memory and disk space are not an issue.

There are many posts online about this issue, and no clear answers. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

The OS is Windows XP w/SP3 and he's running Office Basic 2003. Thanks.

Answer 1

Here are a couple of things to try:

1. Perhaps the computer has a bad memory card. Try running a memory diagnostic, and/or swapping memory cards.
2. Check the swap file settings.
3. Do the temp or tmp environment variables point to someplace odd? Is the user authorized to update those locations?
4. This type of problem is why our IT department uses some type of image software (perhaps ghost). They would just re-image the PC (which is like reinstalling every application, including Windows itself).
5. If all else fails, reinstall Windows (don't repair it, reinstall it).

Good luck.